Mosquito Squadron (2 page)

Each one of the overlapping fighter sectors had a code-name — Hamster, Butterfly, Herring, Polar Bear, Jaguar, Tiger and so on. Together, they were the front line of a deep air defence system of fighters, searchlights and anti-aircraft guns, devised and put into operation more than two years earlier by General Josef Kammhumber, the Luftwaffe’s night fighter commander. The fighter zones, each with a radius of about fifty miles, were code-named ‘Sky Bed’ collectively and they had worked well enough in 1941, when the RAF’s night bombers were attacking in small numbers. But in the middle of 1943, with the bombers coming over in their hundreds, it was a different story.

Richter looked at the wall clock again. It was ten minutes after midnight, and over his headset he could hear the controllers steering the outer screen of fighters towards their first contacts.

‘Tiger, Tiger, couriers in sector Dora-Bertholdt, course zero-eight-zero, height Anton two-nine … couriers in Dora-Dora, zero-eight-five, Anton two-two … ‘ And so it went on as the minutes ticked by, in jargon meaningless to all but trained ears, as the Messerschmitts climbed through the darkness, carrying two young men barely out of school in each of their cockpits, to a deadly rendezvous high over the North Sea with the Lancasters and Halifaxes of the RAF, each carrying seven young men barely out of school.

At twenty minutes past midnight, with the first contacts now expected at any moment, the head of the crawling stream of luminous ants on the big screen was precisely at position 54 degrees 10 minutes north, 07 degrees 30 minutes east, or twenty miles west of Heligoland. Richter listened intently, waiting for the first ‘
Pauke
,
pauke
’ — the ‘Tally Ho!’ of the German night fighters — that would herald the first kills of the night. His practised eye took in the spattering of smaller dots on the screen, each one representing a friendly fighter; it looked as though the ones from Sector Jaguar would be the first to intercept.

Eighteen thousand feet over the German Bight, crouched over the cathode ray tube of his Lichtenstein AI set, Warrant Officer Hans Dorfmann of No. 2 Night Fighter Wing was elatedly chasing the biggest, fattest contact he had ever made in his eighteen months as a radar observer. Slowly and very precisely, striving to keep the excitement out of his voice, he steered his pilot, Lieutenant Stechel, towards it.

‘Four kilometres … course zero-one-zero … zero-one-five now … hold her on zero-one-five … ease her up two hundred metres … ‘

This was beautiful. He was bringing Stechel right up under the bomber’s tail. In the front cockpit, the pilot was already searching the sky ahead, his fingers curled around the triggers that would release a lethal stream of cannon shells and machine-gun bullets from the Messerschmitt 110’s nose armament into the wings and fuselage of their target.

Seconds later, Dorfmann’s curse burst over the intercom, his voice high-pitched with frustration.

‘Damn it, my set has packed in! Lost contact!’

In front of his eyes, the hitherto clear image on his screen had suddenly dissolved into a spider’s web of confused, shimmering lines, totally incomprehensible.

Stechel, too, felt a deep surge of disappointment. ‘Try and get it working,’ he ordered the observer. ‘I’ll carry out a visual search. The bastard can’t be far away.’

Dorfmann juggled with the controls of his radar, but it was hopeless. To judge from the crazy echoes on his screen, it was as though the bomber they had been following had suddenly reproduced itself into dozens of aircraft, surging this way and that across the sky.

In the operations room at Stade, frantic messages were received one after the other from the ‘Wurzburg’ ground control radars and from the fighters they had been directing. Everywhere it was the same story: the radar echoes had crumbled into shifting, meaningless bands of light on every screen in and above northern Germany.

Joachim Richter leaned back in his seat, staring at the big glass screen on which the orderly, moving spots of light had now come to a standstill.

‘I don’t believe it,’ he muttered. ‘I just don’t bloody well believe it.’

Yet it was true. Somehow, incredibly, the enemy had succeeded in blinding the radar eyes of the German air defences — eyes without which the night fighters could not be directed to their targets and the flak batteries could not lay their guns accurately. There was no means, now, of telling which way the bomber stream was heading, until it actually crossed the coast and its progress was reported by observers on the ground.

High over the German Bight, Lieutenant Stechel brought his Messerschmitt 110 round in a wide circle above the clouds. He knew that he must be right in the middle of the bomber stream, but despite the moonlight he could see no other aircraft.

Suddenly, he stood the fighter on its wingtip, pulling it round in a steep turn and bringing a startled exclamation from Dorfmann, still fiddling with his set behind him.

‘Sorry about that,’ Stechel gasped, levelling the wings. ‘Look outside. What do you make of that?’

At first, Dorfmann thought that the 110 was flying through a snowstorm. The aircraft was surrounded by a blizzard of strange particles, glittering in the moonlight. One of them whirled close past the cockpit canopy and it looked, in the fraction of a second before it was lost to sight, like a long strip of metallic toilet paper.

The observer opened his mouth to speak, and in that instant Stechel slammed open the throttles, pulling the Messerschmitt into a steep climb. Ahead and above, his keen eyes had picked out a shadow, fleeting across the stars.

‘Courier, one thousand metres!’ he yelled jubilantly. ‘We’ve got him, Dorfmann. We’ve got the bastard!’

The range closed rapidly, and now the other aircraft was easily identifiable as a four-engined heavy bomber with twin fins — either a Lancaster or a Halifax. Stechel didn’t care which. The enemy aircraft cruised serenely on, its crew apparently unaware of the danger creeping up on them, and Stechel manoeuvred his fighter carefully into position below and astern.

Something fell from the bomber’s belly, almost causing him to break off in alarm, and for a second he watched the dark bundles as they curved down past his port wingtip. Then they came apart, breaking up into confetti-like showers of more of the strange metallic stuff that had almost given him heart failure thirty seconds earlier.

The bomber was huge in his sights now but still he held his fire, closing right in until he was less than a hundred metres astern and just a touch below. The enemy rear gunner must be asleep.

Taking infinite pains, Stechel raised the nose a fraction and sighted on the bomber’s starboard wing between the two engines, a vulnerable spot where the fuel tanks were located. He could not understand why the Tommies had not equipped their bombers with ventral gun turrets as the Americans had done, so eliminating this dangerous blind spot.

He had selected cannon only and now his index fingers squeezed the twin triggers. A mixture of 30- and 20-mm cannon shells blasted out from the 110’s nose guns, shaking the aircraft with the recoil and momentarily blinding the pilot with the muzzle flashes. Powder smoke drifted through the cockpit.

Belatedly, the bomber’s rear gunner opened up, spraying tracer aimlessly into the night as Stechel’s two-second burst slammed home. He dived steeply away from his target, ready to pull up for another attack, and saw at once that there would be no need. A dull red glow in the bomber’s wing burst into a great streamer of fire, illuminating the square-cut tail fins; the target was now positively identified as a Halifax.

The ponderous bomber entered a diving turn to port, corkscrewing away from its attacker, its starboard wing now a mass of flame. Turning, Stechel followed it down as far as the cloud layer, watching it plunge into the opaque grey undercast. An instant later, a vivid orange flash split the clouds, followed in quick succession by several more of lesser intensity.

‘Not much doubt about that one, sir,’ commented Dorfmann, as the pilot regained altitude to resume his patrol. Nevertheless, it was the only enemy aircraft they saw that night, and they were luckier than most.

By the time the embers of Stechel’s Halifax scattered themselves to extinction in the sea, some semblance of order was beginning to emerge from the chaos which had reigned in the operations room at Stade. Thirty minutes after midnight came the first reports that the leading elements of the bomber stream had turned south-east, and ten minutes later the crew of a night fighter called in to say that they had sighted bursts of yellow light, probably marker flares, over the mouth of the Elbe.

Richter glanced to his right and met the eyes of his neighbour, a tall captain who had spent the last two years on the Russian front and who wore the ribbon of the Knight’s Cross. The man’s face was grim. There was no longer any doubt about the RAF’s target for tonight.

‘It’s Hamburg,’ Richter said quietly. The other nodded. A few moments later, ground observers reported that the bombers were passing over Meldorf on a heading of approximately 110 degrees ‘in great strength’. General Schwabedissen immediately ordered all night fighters within range to break away from their designated control sectors and converge on the city, but by the time they arrived it was too late.

The martyrdom of Hamburg began at exactly 0057 hours in the morning of 25 July 1943, when twenty aircraft of the RAF’s Pathfinder Force dropped clusters of flares and target markers over the centre of the city. They were followed, five minutes later, by fifty-nine more bombers, each carrying a mixed load of incendiary markers and high explosive, so that by 0110 the area around the centre of Hamburg was lit up like a Christmas tree.

During the next forty minutes 728 heavy bombers unloaded 2,400 tons of bombs on the hapless city, many of them incendiaries. Raging fires swept through the shattered streets, joining with one another to cause a great firestorm, fed by hurricane-force winds sucked in from Hamburg’s perimeter. The winds picked up everything in their path, including people, and hurled it into the midst of the growing conflagration. Hundreds died in their air-raid shelters, suffocated by oxygen starvation as the inferno raged about them, their bodies reduced to ashes. Those who tried to flee were pulverized by high-explosive bombs, or mown down by flying debris. By 0145 a great sea of fire extended for seven miles between the docks area of Hamburg and the north-west suburbs.

Some bombs fell wide of the aiming point. One stick, jettisoned by a flak-damaged Lancaster, whistled down over the western suburbs and impacted on a maternity hospital. They killed sixty-seven people, mostly women and children. Among them were the wife and unborn child of Captain Wolfgang Lutz, who was trapped under a mound of rubble and eventually dug out, almost insane, nearly two days later.

To the personnel in the underground operations room of 2nd Air Division, the horror of Hamburg was something remote and impersonal. They had an inkling of it only through the terse reports that filtered in from the night fighters, groping blindly in the dark, from the flak batteries, the ground observers and the civil defence, and from the occasional tremor that shook the ground.

The radar was still useless, and not for some hours yet would the defenders know why. Throughout the raid, each bomber had dropped mysterious bundles — like those Stechel and Dorfmann had seen — at the rate of one every minute. The bundles broke apart and released thousands of strips of tinfoil, cut to the wavelengths of the German radar frequencies. Each strip produced a radar echo similar to that of an aircraft, jamming the radar screens with a mass of incomprehensible clutter. The British code-name for this simple and devastatingly effective device was ‘Window’.

The last of the raiders droned away, and in the operations room the staff began to sift through the reports that had come in from the air defences. They held a grim portent for the future. Out of the vast armada that had smashed Hamburg, the flak and night fighters had shot down only twelve bombers.

*

The sun rose blood-red through the fires of the torn city. At dawn, an old man and his wife, haggard and red-eyed through lack of sleep and fear, emerged from the cellar of their little house on the outskirts of Stade and looked to the east.

Beyond the Elbe a massive pillar of smoke rose thousands of feet into the morning sky. It boiled and writhed, shot through with twisting ropes of black and brown. Its top spread out and drifted on the breeze, forming a dark, impenetrable carpet over their heads. They recoiled from it in terror.

‘The chickens are coming home to roost,’ muttered the old man, dragging himself on unwilling feet towards the stable at the bottom of the yard to tend to his mare.

Behind him, his wife whispered hoarsely ‘It is the will of God. The will of — ‘ Her voice broke in a sob and he turned towards her. She was leaning against the wall of their home, both hands clutched to her chest. He managed to catch her as she fell, and she died in his arms a few seconds later.

He carried her indoors and laid her gently on the sofa, closing her eyes. Then he went to the stable and stood for a long time, stroking the neck of his mare, soothing away the fear of the night. Deep within him, anguish was tearing him apart; but he had forgotten how to cry.

Chapter Two

The two men walked along the narrow lane, their shoes kicking up spurts of dust. All around them, apart from an occasional clump of trees and a distant church steeple, showing dimly through the low-lying wraiths of mist that were beginning to creep across the fens, the countryside was entirely flat. Away to the left, the sun was a vast red ball on the western horizon.

The men walked in silence, conscious of the evening sounds: the lowing of cattle, far away, the chatter of a startled blackbird, the rustle of unseen creatures in the hedgerow bordering the lane. Suddenly, one of the men, a grizzled warrant officer with two rows of medal ribbons indicating service in just about every part of the British Empire since the end of World War I, slowed his stride and turned to his companion, a much younger Flight Sergeant.

‘Hang on, Sam,’ the older man said. ‘I’m not as young as I was. Let’s stop for a smoke.’

The other nodded his assent and they perched on a nearby fence, unbuttoning their battledress and looking out over the quiet landscape. The warrant officer produced a crumpled packet of Player’s and offered a cigarette to the flight sergeant before taking one himself. They both lit up, the smoke smelling sweet in the open air.

The flight sergeant belched suddenly and the man beside him grinned.

‘Station farm, duty pig speaking,’ he said.

‘It’s that bloody beer, Len,’ the other protested. ‘Can’t get away with it at all. Don’t tell me the locals have been drinking the stuff for years — I saw the look in their eyes as we were leaving. I’ll bet the landlord got some real stuff out as soon as the door closed behind us.’

Warrant Officer Len Thomas made no reply. Personally, he liked the little tavern on the village green, even though most of the other senior NCOS from RAF Burningham went elsewhere and it was a four-mile walk from the airfield. Then he smiled inwardly, admitting to himself that what he really liked about the place was the landlord’s sister, Betty, a plump rosy-cheeked widow in her forties whose husband had been killed in North Africa. Maybe, he thought, when she’d had time to forget, and things had settled down a bit, he’d ask her if she would consider getting together with him. A man might do a lot worse.

Thomas took a pull at his cigarette and then looked down at his hands, spreading out his fingers. They were broad and muscular and he was suddenly, for the first time in his life, acutely ashamed of them, of the ingrained oil and dirt collected in years of grovelling around in the guts of aero-engines. It seemed that no amount of scrubbing would remove it, but he resolved to try harder. That sort of thing might put a woman off for good.

‘They’re early tonight,’ said Sam Porter, the flight sergeant, his voice cutting abruptly across Thomas’s thoughts.

‘What?’

Porter jerked a thumb towards the south-east and Thomas stared out across the fens, over the pools of mist, puzzled for a moment. Then he, too, heard the unmistakable note of engines, muted at first, then swelling gradually to a full-throated roar. Both men stood up, scanning the horizon, but as yet no aircraft was visible.

‘There he is,’ Porter said, pointing. Thomas saw it at the same instant: a long, dark shape, rising above the mist several miles away, but nevertheless recognizable as a Short Stirling bomber by its tall tailfin. The Stirling turned and climbed steadily away towards the east; it was followed by another and another. The two men counted fifteen in all, following each one as it climbed out over East Anglia until it was lost in the gathering gloom, heading for a rendezvous point with hundreds of others from airfields all over eastern England. The sky over the coast near Great Yarmouth would soon be echoing with man-made thunder as the great bombers wheeled like a flock of rooks before sorting themselves out into their designated stations and heading into the eastern darkness towards their distant target.

‘I wonder if it’s Hamburg again,’ said Thomas.

‘Doubt it,’ Porter retorted. ‘They’ve hit Hamburg three times this week already. They’ll be off to somewhere in the Ruhr, more likely. I don’t fancy their job, poor buggers. Especially in Stirlings. The bloody things won’t climb above fifteen thousand.’

Porter frowned suddenly and threw his cigarette end into the road. ‘Still,’ he went on, ‘at least they’re operational. I’m beginning to think our lot will never get into action. I nearly had a fight with a bomber boy in Downham Market the other day; “the no-op squadron”, he called us. But he was dead right.’

Thomas looked at him sharply. ‘Don’t you worry,’ he said. ‘The CO knows what he’s doing. He won’t declare the squadron fully operational until every man knows his job inside out, and that includes engine fitters, my son. Working up a new squadron is never easy; I’ve seen it all before. It takes time to build up a team, but this is going to be a good one, I can feel it in my bones. Those lads can fly, and the CO’s the best of the lot.’

There was a note of pride in his voice. Porter sniffed and began to fasten up his battledress buttons, for a sudden chill had crept into the air as the sun sank below the horizon.

‘You knew him before, didn’t you.’ It was a statement, rather than a question.

Thomas smiled and nodded. ‘Aye, I did,’ he said, his voice betraying his Lancashire origins. ‘In France, before Dunkirk. Green as grass, he was, but he soon learned. He was luckier than most. Got shot down, hitch-hiked his way across half France, got shot down again and came off the beaches with the army. Went through the fighting in August and September ’40, too.’

‘Seems a bit funny though, having a single-seat fighter bloke commanding a Mosquito squadron,’ Porter said.

Thomas removed his forage cap and scratched his head. ‘Oh, I don’t know. He’s got a hell of a lot of experience. He was in North Africa and Malta too, you know. And I heard on the grapevine that he didn’t volunteer for a transfer to twin-engined aircraft; he was sent on the Mossie conversion course, got in a few ops with 2 Group and then they promoted him and told him to get on with the job of forming a squadron.’

Porter looked sideways at his friend. ‘You seem to know a lot about it,’ he said.

Thomas grinned. ‘Comes of having mates in admin., if you want to know the secret.’ He put on his cap again and shivered slightly.

‘Damn it, it’s turning cold. Come on, let’s get a move on. It’s not for the likes of you and me, Sam, to question who gets posted where or why. Our job’s to keep the Merlins turning.’

He glanced at his watch. ‘There’s just time for one in the Mess, and then we’d better turn in. The squadron will be back first thing in the morning, and no doubt there’ll be the usual number of snags to sort out. I hate the very thought of other people tampering with my lovely engines.’

Porter laughed. ‘You’ve just got to remember that there’s a war on,’ he said. Together, they walked off in the rapidly spreading dusk.

*

Squadron Leader George Yeoman, DFC, DFM, was nursing a hangover. He felt for his oxygen mask, which was dangling loose by its strap, clipped it into position over his face, turned the oxygen fully on and took several deep breaths. His head began to clear almost at once, but in his stomach the breakfast he had forced down was only just holding its own with the residue of last night’s alcohol.

It was six o’clock in the morning of 1 August 1943, and the ten Mosquitos of No. 380 Squadron, RAF, were returning to their Norfolk airfield of Burningham after spending four days at the Armament Practice Camp at Fairwood Common, in Gloucestershire. It had been a hectic period during which No. 380’s crews had flown intensively, carrying out air-to-air firing against towed targets, live bombing exercises off the Welsh coast, and practice interceptions on the Beaufighters of No. 68 Squadron, which shared Fairwood Common with the APC.

Yeoman made a mental resolution never, ever, to drink again with 68 Squadron. He hadn’t intended things to get out of hand, but a spontaneous party had developed because 380’s last night at Fairwood Common had just happened to coincide with the award of a DFC to one of the 68 Squadron navigators.

Still, he thought, his chaps had deserved to let their hair down. He had been driving them pretty hard over the last few weeks, and now they were as good as he could make them. The squadron was a team at last, right down to the lowliest airman.

‘Not feeling very well, skipper?’

Yeoman glanced over his right shoulder into the mournful features of his navigator, Flying Officer Steve Hardy, who was known as ‘Happy’ Hardy because he had never been known to smile. He had a remarkable capacity for beer though, and he had been known to do outrageous things to unsuspecting people. There had been the time on his previous squadron, for instance, when he had released two large, angry and very malodorous billy-goats into the ante-room of the officers’ mess, which at the time had been full of Very Important Visitors and their Equally Important Wives. The story was legendary, and Yeoman wondered how Hardy had escaped without being hanged, drawn and quartered. Perhaps the fact that he was one of the best navigators in the Air Force had something to do with it.

Hardy was sporting a black eye this morning, the result of violent contact with someone’s elbow during a game of Mess Rugby with the 68 Squadron types. It made him look even more like a sick spaniel.

‘How do I look?’ Yeoman asked.

‘Bloody awful. How about me?’

‘Worse. How long to base?’

‘Ten minutes. if you’ll stop wandering all over the sky, that is. Left two degrees.’

He looked back, twisting in his seat harness. ‘The others are following you like a lot of lemmings. Straggling all over the place. I don’t think we’ve got one good brain between us.’

Yeoman grunted. ‘I think you’re right. And I’ve no doubt the Station Commander will be there to meet us when we get back. Better get this lot sorted out.’

He pressed the R/T button. ‘Squirrel Leader to Squirrel Aircraft. Close up.’

His words had the desired effect. A second Mosquito nosed its way into position beyond and behind his starboard wing, followed by two others, while a fourth aircraft placed itself off to the left. Within the space of half a minute the formation had arranged itself into two compact flights of four aircraft, with the two remaining Mosquitos bringing up the rear. Yeoman smiled to himself, satisfied, knowing that his pilots had reacted instinctively to his order.

The Mosquitos cruised on at a steady 230 mph, five thousand feet above the tranquil English countryside, their Rolls-Royce Merlin 21 engines singing healthily. Yeoman relaxed, feeling better now, allowing his hand to rest gently on the control column, his gaze automatically roving across the instrument panel, then to the sky and the aircraft around him, then back to the panel again.

It was funny, thought Yeoman, how he had got used to the idea of carrying a navigator, even after more than three years of flying single-seat fighters. Hardy had become almost an extension of himself, like an extra limb in the cockpit, an unobtrusive voice over the intercom, shepherding, guiding, sometimes admonishing, always striving for perfection. And that was how it ought to be; it was the recipe for survival.

The morning was brilliant, the sky cloudless, the sun burning the eyeballs even through smoked glasses, its rays dancing on cockpit canopies and the shimmering arcs of the propellers.

Somehow, it made the outlines of the Mosquitos, with their drab war-paint — dark grey and green upper surfaces, grey bellies — appear less aggressive.

Yet aggressive the Mosquito Mk VI certainly was, and powerful too, but nonetheless clean and graceful; an inspiration both to look at and to fly. Yeoman, who at first had viewed his conversion to twin-engined aircraft with considerable misgivings, had fallen completely in love with it. Its revolutionary concept appealed to him, for a start. Conceived as an unarmed day bomber back in 1938 by the de Havilland Aircraft Company, without any government approval or funding whatsoever, it was built from balsa wood, ply and birch laths, glued under pressure, a process that endowed it with a remarkable lightness as well as great strength, and its twin Rolls-Royce Merlin engines gave it a speed that compared favourably with most single-engined fighters of the day. It was fully aerobatic, too, and could be rolled on one engine.

The Mosquito FB Mk VI was the latest variant, and the newly-formed No. 380 Squadron had been one of the first to equip with the type, receiving its first examples in May 1943. Formidably armed with a battery of four 20-mm cannon and four .303 machine-guns in the nose, the Mk VI could also carry two 250- or 500-lb bombs in the rear of the bomb-bay, with two additional bombs or 50-gallon fuel tanks under the wings.

Mosquitos had been taking the war to the enemy ever since the end of March 1942, when No. 105 Squadron, flying the unarmed bomber version, had attacked Cologne the day after the RAF’s first big thousand-bomber raid. More spectacular missions had followed, including a daring low-level raid on the Gestapo HQ in Oslo on 25 September and an attack on Berlin by Nos. 105 and 139 Squadrons, the first time RAF aircraft had flown over the enemy capital in daylight. That raid had been brilliantly timed to coincide with the tenth anniversary celebrations of the Nazi Party; all over Germany, people had been sitting by their radios, waiting to hear a speech by Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering. Instead, they had heard the sound of the Mosquitos’ bombs, exploding near the radio station in Berlin.